Confluent boosts access to real-time data with new partner program 

Data streaming major Confluent has launched a ‘Connect with Confluent’ partner program to help technology providers like Google BigQuery and MongoDB enable faster access to real-time data streams through their products.

The initiative will enable vendors to bring fully managed data streams directly to their customers through native integrations with Confluent Cloud. It also provides partners with access to technical, sales and marketing support to amplify go-to-market efforts and ensure their customers can make the most of real-time data at every stage and unlock new experiences for end users.

“When companies can harness streams of real-time data from previously siloed teams and applications across their business, it creates a powerful network effect that opens new avenues for growth and innovation,” Erica Schultz, president of field operations at Confluent, said in a press statement. “As technology partners bring Confluent data streams directly into their platforms, they unlock potential for more cutting edge, real-time applications to be developed on their platform.”

How will Connect with Confluent help?

Enterprises are bullish on real-time data, with 89% of technology leaders saying investments in data streaming are important, while 44% cite the technology as a top strategic priority for their business. Even IDC predicts that nearly 30% of data generated by 2025 will be real-time.

However, in light of these changes, technology providers are facing pressures to allow for streaming data support and enable the development of real-time applications and experiences. Most enterprises tend to tackle this problem by building integrations with open source data streaming platform Apache Kafka. The approach works but the integrations require customers to develop and deploy Kafka clusters, which must be manually secured, governed and managed as they scale.

They also have to individually integrate all of their data into the cluster — which is no help either.

With the new partner program, Confluent strives to bridge this gap by providing technology vendors with a single, native integration with Confluent Cloud. Once integrated, the Apache Kafka-based service can provide enterprises access to more than an exabyte of data streams from across their entire business, along with fully managed stream processing, enterprise-grade security controls and a governance suite for Kafka. 

This addresses all the shortcomings of open-source integrations while accelerating the real-time project for the buyer at the same time.

Multiple technology partners onboard

A number of leading technology vendors have already joined the Connect with Confluent program, including Arcion, AWS Lambda, Clickhouse, Elastic, Google Cloud, HiveMQ, Imply, Materialize, MongoDB, Onehouse, Precisely, Qlik, Quix, Rockset, Startree, Tinybird and Waterstream.

“With Confluent Cloud now accessible within BigQuery, customers can easily stream and analyze data in real-time from across cloud and hybrid environments,” said Manish Dalwadi, director of product management for BigQuery at Google Cloud.

“Our mission is to keep data open, flexible, and secure, and our partnership with Confluent will streamline data management and free up resources that can be reallocated toward other digital transformation projects,” he added. 

John Broad, Imply’s VP of partners and alliances, had similar feedback. He noted that the integration has enabled the company’s SaaS platform to unlock real-time analytics on continuous data streams with unparalleled ease and speed. 

Other companies working to mobilize real-time data include StreamSets, Red Hat, Databricks, Cloudera and MemSQL.